W.B.Yeats: News for the Delphic Oracle (2)

This is from Yeats' last poems. As he got older he, like so many of us, found that the restraints of his youth and middle age fell from him. 'Why should not old men be mad?' he asked in one of these late poems. And in another:

You think it horrible that lust and rage
should dance attention upon my old age;
they were not such a plague when I was young;
what else have I to spur me into song?

'News for the Delphic Oracle' is a melange of all his old favourite themes: Irish mythology, Greek myth and philosophy, dolphins and lust. And a wonderful poem it is especially if one reads it (as Yeats would surely have wished) with due attention to metre, rhythm and rhyme. Then it is very nearly song. I made two versions of this poem, because on Windows Movie Maker it is impossible to narrate timeline while audio-vision is playing: you can have my voice with accompanying music and pictures, but you cannot hear and see me and listen to music and watch pictures at the same time. So: I present both versions for your delight. If you have a preference, please tell me! (Perhaps Microsoft will issue a new improved program so that one can hear and see everything at once!!)

The music is from Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe.

News for the Delphic Oracle

There all the golden codgers lay,
there the silver dew,
and the great water sighed for love,
and the wind sighed too.
Man-picker Niamh leant and sighed
by Oisin on the grass;
there sighed amid his choir of love
tall Pythagoras.
Plotinus came and looked about,
the salt-flakes on his breast,
and having stretched and yawned awhile
lay sighing like the rest.

Straddling each a dolphin's back
and steadied by a fin,
those Innocents re-live their death,
their wounds open again.
The ecstatic waters laugh because
their cries are sweet and strange,
through their ancestral patterns dance,
and the brute dolphins plunge
until, in some cliff-sheltered bay
where wades the choir of love
proffering its sacred laurel crowns,
they pitch their burdens off.

Slim adolescence that a nymph has stripped,
Peleus on Thetis stares.
Her limbs are delicate as an eyelid,
Love has blinded him with tears;
but Thetis belly listens.
Down the mountain walls
from where Pan's cavern is
intolerable music falls.
Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear,
belly shoulder, bum,
flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs
copulate in the foam.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• w.b.yeats
• news
• delphic
• oracle
• irish
• poetry
• charles
• bryant
• ravel
• spoken
• word

[Butohesqe]

you rock! just getting into yeats, man this guy is so complex! i like your readings, especially Byantium - made me have an awesome dream!!

[brychar66]

thanks! I watched happyireland's vids of Purgatory by Yeats the other day - that was a pure Yeatsian experience! hope your dream was a good one!

[ginamari]

I like your poetry readings where I can read along the words :)

[brychar66]

Thank you Gina. I try to add the text on all my readings these days.

[brychar66]

I have been reading Yeats for around half a century and have never ever tired of him. He is sensuous as well as learned and this makes for a wonderful combination. And of course he's an ace poet! Thank you.

[megansspark]

SO wonderful. I smiled at the notes too. I suppose life long madness is a blessing then? I hope! Charles you are on fire lately and delighted- I am.